Lab46 Wiki

After installing Openbox, I began following an online tutorial on customizing the window manager.

It was recommended that I install certain themes, obconf and pypanel:

sudo apt-get install obconf openbox-themes pypanel

The first portion that is edited is the menu, which is done by editing the menu.xml file. There are multiple methods given to edit the menu. I am using a few, just to try them out. The first one is the obconf program, which allows me to customize openbox graphically. I also looked directly into the menu.xml file and edited a few things. These were my findings so far:

The file contents:

  1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  2 
  3 <openbox_menu xmlns="http://openbox.org/"
  4         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  5         xsi:schemaLocation="http://openbox.org/
  6                 file:///usr/share/openbox/menu.xsd">
  7 
  8 <menu id="root-menu" label="Openbox 3">
  9   <item label="Terminal emulator">
 10     <action name="Execute"><execute>x-terminal-emulator</execute></action>
 11   </item>
 12   <item label="Web browser">
 13     <action name="Execute"><execute>x-www-browser</execute></action>
 14   </item>
 15   <!-- This requires the presence of the 'menu' package to work -->
 16   <menu id="/Debian" />
 17   <separator />
 18   <menu id="client-list-menu" />
 19   <separator />
 20   <item label="ObConf">
 21     <action name="Execute"><execute>obconf</execute></action>
 22   </item>
 23   <item label="Reconfigure">
 24     <action name="Reconfigure" />
 25   </item>
 26   <item label="Restart">
 27     <action name="Restart" />
 28   </item>
 29   <separator />
 30   <item label="Exit">
 31     <action name="Exit" />
 32   </item>
 33 </menu>
 34 
 35 </openbox_menu>

We will refer to the file in a bit. The next step on the tutorial page is setting up a background image.

I first install feh:

sudo apt-get install feh

Then run the following:

feh --bg-scale path/to/the/image.ext

Setting the wallpaper this way is not permanent, but it will have to do for now. Later on in the tutorial I will be setting it permanently. For now, I will make shell script that I will run at startup that will set the background.